THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED ON THIS WEB SITE ARE SOLEY THOSE OF THE ORIGINAL AUTHORS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

A word from Hong Kong’s real boss

Just in case you needed reminding that Beijing’s Liaison Office is now running Hong Kong, its boss Zhang Xiaoming delivers a Policy Address and Update. He describesrecent subversion of the city’s legal principles as ‘rule of law’ and the overturning of democratic election results as ‘a heavy blow against independence’. He also declares himself satisfied that the local masses now better understand ‘One Country Two Systems’, and they think the stationing of Mainland cops at the new West Kowloon High-Speed Rail Station is just fine and dandy too.

Zhang is now in effect our Party Secretary, representing the higher authority and watching over the local administrative appointees in China’s ‘church and state’ system. We can be pretty sure that he and his malevolent sidekicks are behind the continued hounding of evil counter-revolutionary elements, such as the attempt to bankrupt disqualified lawmakers a la Singapore. It is a Rectification Struggle no-brainer – banish the dissidents from public office, deprive their radical groups of fat Legislative Council allowances, and scare the monkeys.

This also goes for the even more questionable/intriguing/harebrained effort to jail Joshua Wong et al for the Great 2014 Storming of Civic Square and Triggering of Umbrella Mayhem.

To Communist Party Commissar Zhang, hurling the deviant foreign-influenced enemy and dissident into a dungeon is a matter of patriotic duty, to defend the Glorious Motherland from hostile forces. And a particular type of grumpy loser – certain newspaper columnists, for example –will get a kick out of seeing the annoying little twerps put behind bars. But for local officials like Chief Executive Carrie Lam, wringing their hands and hoping to create unity and harmony, this could be at least a minor nightmare.

Leave aside the local impact. To some influential audiences overseas, Joshua Wong is famous – probably the only Hongkonger they’ve ever heard of (give or take an aging uncool actor). He is the city’s mop-topped teen heartthrob, geeky rebel and fighter for freedom and justice, covered by trendy journalists and even featured in a documentary film for demanding democracy.

The courts hearing this case are, if Zhang is correct, now just tools of the executive. So are Beijing’s ogres and their local minions really dumb enough to turn an icon of Hong Kong soft power into a prisoner of conscience?

Related

Post navigation

Search this blog

「我感到憂慮的，不是香港自主權會被北京剝奪，而是這項權利會一點一滴地斷送在香港某些人手裏（My anxiety is this: not that this community's autonomy would be usurped by Peking, but that it could be given away bit by bit by some people in Hong Kong）。」
----港督彭定康1996年發表他任內最後一份《施政報告》